"HOLOCAUST awareness,"
the Israeli writer Boas Evron
observes, is actually "an official,
propagandistic indoctrination, a churning
out of slogans and a false view of the
world, the real aim of which is not at all
an understanding of the past, but a
manipulation of the present."

Two central dogmas underpin the
Holocaust framework: the Holocaust marks a
categorically unique historical event and
the climax of an irrational Gentile hatred
of Jews. Although they became the
centrepieces of Holocaust literature,
neither figures at all in genuine
scholarship on the Nazi Holocaust. On the
other hand, both dogmas draw on important
strands in Judaism and in Zionism.

The "Holocaust uniqueness" dogma
became, according to Peter Novick,
author of The
Holocaust in American Life
"axiomatic", a "fetishism" and a "cult" in
"official Jewish discourse". No speech
crime loomed larger than the use of the
words "Holocaust" and "genocide" to
describe other catastrophes. In an
illuminating essay, historian David
Stannard ridicules the 'small industry
of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the
uniqueness of the Jewish experience with
all the energy and ingenuity of
theological zealots".

The uniqueness dogma makes no sense.
Every historical event is unique, if
merely by virtue of time and location, and
every historical event bears distinct
features as well as features in common
with other historical events. The anomaly
of the Holocaust is that its uniqueness is
held to be crucial. What other historical
event, one might ask, is framed largely
for its categorical uniqueness? Typically,
distinctive features of the Holocaust are
isolated in order to place the event
itself in a category apart. Novick
dismisses this "gerrymandering" technique
as "intellectual sleight of hand" which
entails "deliberately singling out one or
more distinctive features of the event and
trivialising or sweeping under the rug
those features it shares with other events
to which it might be compared".

All Holocaust writers agree
that the Holocaust is unique, but
few, if any, agree why. Each time
an argument for Holocaust
uniqueness is empirically
refuted, a new argument is
adduced in its stead. The result,
according to Jean-Michel
Chaumont, is multiple,
conflicting arguments that annul
each other: "Knowledge does not
accumulate. Rather, to improve on
the former argument, each new one
starts from zero." In other
words, uniqueness is a given in
the Holocaust framework; proving
it is the appointed task, and
disproving it is equivalent to
Holocaust denial. Perhaps the
problem lies with the premise,
not the proof. Even if the
Holocaust were unique, what
difference would it make?

Some
years back, the spoof of a New
York tabloid was head-lined,
MICHAEL
JACKSON, 60 MILLION OTHERS, DIE
IN NUCLEAR
HOLOCAUST.
The letters page carried an irate
protest from Wiesel: 'How dare
people refer to what happened
yesterday as a Holocaust? There
was only one
Holocaust.'

How would it change our understanding
if the Holocaust were not the first but
the fourth or fifth in a line of
comparable catastrophes?

The most recent entry into the
Holocaust uniqueness sweepstakes is
Stephen Katz'sThe Holocaust in
Historical Context. Citing nearly
5,000 titles in the first of a projected
three-volume study, Katz surveys the full
sweep of human history in order to prove
that "the Holocaust is phenomenologically
unique by virtue of the fact that never
before has a state set out, as a matter of
intentional principle and actualised
policy, to annihilate physically every
man, woman and child belonging to a
specific people". His argument is that an
historical event containing a distinct
feature is a distinct historical
event.

Only a flea's
hop separates the claim of Holocaust
uniqueness from the claim that the
Holocaust cannot be rationally
apprehended. If the Holocaust is
unprecedented in history, it must stand
above, and hence cannot be grasped by,
history: it is unique because it is
inexplicable and inexplicable because
it is unique.

Dubbed by Novick the 'sacralisation of
the Holocaust", this mystifications's most
practised purveyor is Elie Wiesel.
For Wiesel, Novick observes, the Holocaust
is effectively a "mystery" religion: it
"leads into darkness", "negates all
answers", "lies outside, if not beyond,
history", "defies both knowledge and
description", "cannot be explained nor
visualised", is "never to be comprehended
or transmitted", marks a "destruction of
history" and a "mutation on a cosmic
scale". Only the survivor-priest (read
Wiesel) is qualified to divine its
mystery. "Any survivor," according to
Wiesel, "has more to say than all the
historians combined about what happened."
And yet, the Holocaust's mystery, Wiesel
avows, is "noncommunicable". "We cannot
even talk about it."

Rationally comprehending the Holocaust
means denying it since reason denies the
Holocaust's uniqueness and mystery. To
desacralise or demystify the Holocaust is
accordingly, for Wiesel, a subtle form of
anti-Semitism. To compare the Holocaust
with the sufferings of others constitutes
a "total betrayal of Jewish history". Some
years back, the spoof of a New York
tabloid was headlined,
"MICHAEL
JACKSON, 60 MILLION OTHERS, DIE IN NUCLEAR
HOLOCAUST".
The letters page carried an irate
protest from Wiesel: "How dare people
refer to what happened yesterday as a
Holocaust? There was only one Holocaust."
The scholarly consensus is that the
Holocaust uniqueness debate is sterile.
The claims of Holocaust uniqueness have
come to constitute a form of "intellectual
terrorism".

A subtext of the Holocaust uniqueness
claim is that the Holocaust was uniquely
evil. However terrible, the suffering of
others simply does not compare. Proponents
of Holocaust uniqueness typically disclaim
this implication, but Novick rightly
dismisses such demurrals as disingenuous.
"The claim that the assertion of the
Holocaust's uniqueness is not a form of
invidious comparison produces systematic
doubletalk ... Does anyone ... believe
that the claim of uniqueness is anything
other than a claim for preeminence?"
(Emphasis in original.)

There is another factor at work. The
claim of Holocaust uniqueness is a claim
for Jewish uniqueness. Not the suffering
of Jews but that Jews suffered is what
made the Holocaust unique: the Holocaust
is special because Jews are special. Thus
Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of
Jewish Theological Seminary, ridicules the
Holocaust uniqueness claim as "a
distasteful secular version of
chosenness".

For
Anti Defamation League (ADL) head
Abraham Foxman, right, the
Holocaust "was not simply one example of
genocide but a near successful attempt on
the life of God's chosen children and,
thus, on God himself". And Elie Wiesel is
no less vehement that Jews are unique than
he is about the uniqueness of the
Holocaust: "Everything about us is
different."

The Holocaust dogma of Gentile hatred
also validates the complementary dogma of
uniqueness. If the Holocaust marked the
climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of
the Jews, the persecution of non-Jews in
the Holocaust was merely accidental and
the persecution of non-Jews in history
merely episodic. From every standpoint,
Jewish suffering during the Holocaust was
unique.

Embedded in the Holocaust framework, much
of the literature on Hitler's final
solution is worthless as scholarship. The
first major Holocaust hoax was The
Painted Bird by Polish emigré
Jerzy Kosinski. The book was
"written in English", Kosinski explained,
so that "I could write dispassionately,
free from the emotional connotation one's
native language always contains". In fact,
whatever parts he actually authored (an
unresolved question) were written in
Polish. The book purports to be the
autobiographical account of a solitary
child wandering through rural Poland
during WWII. In fact, Kosinski lived with
his parents throughout the war. The book's
motif is the sadistic, sexual tortures
perpetrated by the Polish peasantry.
Pre-publication readers derided it as a
"pornography of violence" and "the product
of a mind obsessed with sadomasochistic
violence". The book depicts the Polish
peasants he lived with as virulently
anti-Semitic. "Beat the Jews," they jeer.
"Beat the bastards." In fact, Polish
peasants harboured the Kosinski family,
fully aware of their Jewishness and the
dire consequences they themselves faced if
caught. Kosinski invented most of the
pathological episodes he narrates.

In the New York Times Book
Review, Wiesel acclaimed The Painted
Bird as one of the best indictments of the
Nazi era, "written with deep sincerity and
sensitivity". Cynthia Ozick later
said that she immediately recognized
Kosinski's authenticity as "a Jewish
survivor and witness to the Holocaust".
Long after Kosinski was exposed as a
consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel
continued to heap encomiums on his
"remarkable body of work". Best-seller and
award-winner, translated into numerous
languages, required reading in high school
and college classes, The Painted
Bird became a basic Holocaust text.
Finally exposed by an investigative news
weekly, Kosinski was still stoutly
defended by the New York Times,
which alleged that he was the victim of a
communist plot.

To his credit, Kosinski did undergo a
kind of deathbed conversion. In the few
years between his exposure and his
suicide, he deplored the Holocaust's
exclusion of non-Jewish victims.

"Many North American Jews tend
to perceive the Shoah as an exclusively
Jewish disaster ... But at least half
the world's Romanies (unfairly called
Gypsies), some 2.5 million Polish
Catholics, millions of Soviet citizens
and various nationalities, were also
victims of this genocide."

He also paid tribute to the bravery of
the Poles who sheltered him during the
Holocaust despite his so-called Semitic
looks. Angrily asked at a Holocaust
conference what did the Poles do to save
the Jews, Kosinski snapped back, "What did
the Jews do to save the Poles?"

The more recent fraud, Binjamin
Wilkomirski'sFragments,
borrows promiscuously from the Holocaust
kitsch of The Painted Bird. Like
Kosinski, Wilkomirski portrays himself as
a solitary child survivor who becomes
mute, winds up in an orphanage and only
belatedly discovers he is Jewish. Like
The Painted Bird, the chief
narrative conceit of Fragments is
the simple, pared-down voice of a
child-naif that allows time-frames and
place names to remain vague. Like The
Painted Bird, each chapter of
Fragments climaxes in an orgy of
violence. Kosinski represented The
Painted Bird as "the slow unfreezing
of the mind"; Wilkomirski represents
Fragments as "recovered memory". It
is the archetypal Holocaust memoir. Every
concentration camp guard is a crazed,
sadistic monster joyfully cracking the
skulls of Jewish newborns. Yet, the
classic memoirs of the Nazi camps concur
with the views of Auschwitz survivor Dr
Ella Lingens-Reiner: "There were few
sadists. Not more than five or ten per
cent." However, ubiquitous German sadism
figures prominently in Holocaust
literature.

Yet the
singularity of Fragments lies in its
depiction of life not during but after
the Holocaust. Adopted by a Swiss
family, little Binyamin endures yet new
torments. He is trapped in a world of
Holocaust deniers. "Forget it - it's a
bad dream," his mother screams. "It was
only a bad dream ... You're not to
think about it any more." "Here in this
country," he chafes, "everyone keeps
saying I'm to forget and that it never
happened, I only dreamed it. But they
know all about it!"

Driven to abject despair, Binyamin
reaches a Holocaust epiphany. "The camp's
still there - just hidden and well
disguised. They've taken off their
uniforms and dressed themselves up in nice
clothes so as not to be recognized ...
Just give them the gentlest of hints that
maybe, possibly, you're a Jew, and you'll
feel it: these are the same people, and
I"m sure of it. They can still kill, even
out of uniform."

Translated into a dozen languages,
winner of the Jewish National Book Award,
the Jewish Quarterly Prize, and the Prix
de Mémoire de la Shoah,
Fragments was widely hailed as a
classic of Holocaust literature. Star of
documentaries, keynoter at Holocaust
conferences and seminars, fund-raiser for
the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, Wilkomirski quickly became a
Holocaust poster boy.

Acclaiming Fragments a 'small
masterpiece", Daniel Goldhagen,
author of the controversial 1996
publication Hitler's Willing
Executioners, was Wilkomirski's main
academic champion. Knowledgeable
historians like Raul Hilberg,
however, early on pegged Fragments
as a fraud. Wilkomirski, it turns out,
spent the entire war in Switzerland. He is
not even Jewish. But Israel Gutman,
a former inmate of Auschwitz and now a
director of Yad Vashem and a Holocaust
lecturer at Hebrew University, says it's
not that important whether
Fragments is a fraud. "Wilkomirski
has written a story which he has
experienced deeply; that's for sure ... He
is not a fake. He is someone who lives
this story very deeply in his soul. The
pain is authentic."

The New Yorker called its exposé
of the Wilkomirski fraud "stealing the
Holocaust". Yesterday Wilkomirski was
feted for his tales of Gentile evil; today
he is chastised as yet another evil
Gentile. It's always the Gentiles' fault.
True, Wilkomirski fabricated his Holocaust
past, but the larger truth is that the
Holocaust industry fabricated Wilkomirski:
he was a Holocaust survivor just waiting
to be discovered.

Consider now Holocaust secondary
literature. Novick justly describes
Yehuda Bauer, lecturer at the
Hebrew University and a director of Yad
Vashem, as a "leading Israeli Holocaust
scholar". He quotes an article by Bauer to
refute the Goldhagen thesis of German
complicity in Hitler's final solution:

"The Jews were murdered by
people who, to a large degree, did not
actually hate them ... The Germans did
not have to hate the Jews in order to
kill them."

Yet, in a review of Goldhagen's book,
Bauer maintained the exact opposite: "The
most radical type of murderous attitudes
dominated from the end of the 1930s onward
... [B]y the outbreak of World War
II the vast majority of Germans had
identified with the regime and its
antisemitic policies to such an extent
that it was easy to recruit the
murderers." Questioned about this
discrepancy, Bauer replied: "I cannot see
any contradiction between these
statements."

In the wake of Israel's ill-fated
invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and as
official Israeli propaganda claims came
under withering attack by Israel's "new
historians" (Index 3/1995), apologists
desperately sought to tar the Arabs with
Nazism. The historian Bernard Lewis
managed to devote a full chapter of his
short history of anti-Semitism, and fully
three pages of his "brief history of the
last 2,000 years" of the Middle East, to
Arab Nazism. New Republic literary
editor Leon Wieseltier claimed that
"the Palestinians, or many of them, were
Hitler's little helpers in the Middle
East". According to Novick, Middle East
politics are no longer a prime mover of
the Holocaust industry. He quotes a
statement by ADL's Foxman deploring "the
use of Holocaust imagery" in the context
of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The most recent Holocaust extravaganza
is Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Every important journal of opinion printed
one or more reviews within weeks of its
release. The New York Times
featured multiple notices, acclaiming
Goldhagen's book as "one of those rare new
works that merit the appellation
landmark". With sales of half a million
copies and translations slated for 13
languages, Time magazine hailed
Hitler's Willing Executioners as
the "most talked about" and second-best
non-fiction book of the year.

Pointing to the "remarkable research",
and "wealth of proof ... with overwhelming
support of documents and facts", Wiesel
heralded the book as a "tremendous
contribution to the understanding and
teaching of the Holocaust". Gutman praised
it for "raising anew clearly central
questions" which "the main body of
Holocaust scholarship" ignores. Nominated
for the Holocaust chair at Harvard
University, paired with Wiesel in the
national media, Goldhagen quickly became a
ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust
circuit.

The central thesis of Goldhagen's book
is standard Holocaust dogma: driven by a
pathological hatred, the German people
leapt at the opportunity Hitler gave them
to murder the Jews. Although disguised as
an academic study, Hitler's Willing
Executioners amounts to little more
than a compendium of sadistic
violence.

Yet despite
the hype, there is no evidence, says
Novick, that "Holocaust deniers" exert
the slightest influence in the US.
Indeed, given the nonsense churned out
daily by the Holocaust industry, the
wonder is there are so few
sceptics.

The motive behind the claim that there
is widespread Holocaust denial is not hard
to find. In a society saturated with the
Holocaust, how else to justify yet more
museums, books, curricula, films and
programmes except by conjuring up the
bogey of Holocaust denial? Thus Deborah
Lipstadt's acclaimed book, Denying
the Holocaust, as well as a contrived
poll alleging pervasive Holocaust denial,
were released just as the Washington
Holocaust Museum opened.

Denying
the Holocaust is an updated version of
the "new anti-Semitism" tracts. To
document widespread Holocaust denial,
Lipstadt cites publications by - in
Novick's words - "a tiny band of cranks,
kooks and misfits". Her pièce de
résistance is Arthur Butz,
the protagonist of her chapter "Entering
the mainstream". Butz, who teaches
electrical engineering at Northwestern
University, published his book The Hoax
of the Twentieth Century with a
crackpot press; were it not for the likes
of Lipstadt, no one would have heard of
him

The one truly mainstream holocaust
denier is Bernard Lewis. A French
court even convicted Lewis of denying
genocide. But this was the Armenian
genocide and Lewis is pro-Israel.
Accordingly, this holocaust denial raises
no hackles in the US; the fact that Turkey
is an Israeli ally was a further
extenuating circumstance. Mention of the
Armenian genocide is, therefore, taboo.
Wiesel, Harvard Law School professor
Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Arthur
Hertzberg withdrew from an
international conference on genocide in
Tel Aviv because the sponsors, against
government urging, included sessions on
the Armenian case. Acting at Israel's
behest, the US Holocaust Council
"virtually effaced" mention of the
Armenians in the Washington Holocaust
Museum; and Jewish lobbyists in Congress
blocked a day of remembrance for the
Armenian genocide.

To question a survivor's testimony, to
denounce the role of Jewish collaborators,
to suggest that Germans suffered during
the
bombing of Dresden or any state except
Germany committed crimes in WWII is,
according to Lipstadt, all evidence of
Holocaust denial. But the most "insidious"
form of Holocaust denial, she suggests, is
"immoral equivalencies": that is, denying
the uniqueness of the Holocaust. This
argument has intriguing implications.
Goldhagen argues that Serbian "deeds" in
Kosovo "are, in their essence, different
from those of Nazi Germany only in scale".
That would make Goldhagen "in essence" a
Holocaust denier. Across the political
spectrum, Israeli commentators compared
Serbia's "deeds" in Kosovo with Israeli
"deeds" in 1948 against the Palestinians.
Reckoning, then, by Goldhagen, Israel
committed a holocaust. Not even
Palestinians claim that any more.

Newspaper editors display "fragility of
reason", in Lipstadt's view, if they run a
Holocaust denial "ad or op-ed column that,
according to their own evaluation, is
totally lacking in relevance or
substance". But not all revisionist
literature is totally worthless. Lipstadt
brands UK historian David Irving
"one of the most dangerous spokespersons
for Holocaust denial", yet Irving has also
made indispensable contributions towards
explaining Nazism. And Arno Mayer,
in his important study of the Nazi
Holocaust, as well as Raul Hilberg, cite
Holocaust denial publications. "Even if
the world is in the right," Mill
wrote in his essay "On Liberty", "it is
always probable that dissentients have
something worth hearing to say for
themselves, and that truth would lose
something by their silence."

Norman
Finkelstein
teaches political theory at the City
University of New York. He is the
author of A Nation on Trial: The
Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth
(with Ruth Bettina Birn). His latest
book, The Holocaust Industry, will be
published in July by Verso.